OOPS: Ilhan Omar’s Speech Gets Called Out For Invoking Genocidal Language

There’s a lot going on in this speech, and most of us wouldn’t have a clue about the details unless someone had translated it into English.

But now that we’re seeing what was said when she thought nobody was listening, we know a little more about what’s she’s really like as both a person and a politician.

Her professed allegiance to Somalia above any other allegiance and other statements to that effect will have to wait for another column. In this instance, it’s the call to murder others that caught this writers attention.

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First, the quote opens with a very casual mention of Somalis killing one another despite their love for each other. Friction made them do it.

The speech she gave was reacting to a memorandum of understanding in which Ethiopia would recognize Somaliland as a state, in exchange for their use of a sea port and Somaliland being recognized as independent. Somalia, who thinks that region belongs to them, is very upset about that arrangement.

Ilhan Omar, a speaker at an event comprised of Somalis, referred to people from Somaliland as ‘people who call themselves Somalis or claim to be Somalis’.

If that sounds like race-based derision, well, she’s just getting started.

She went on to say ‘Somalia is for Somalis only’ and complained that over 45% of Somali are not even ethnic Somalis.

That is not an innocent phrase.

In the same speech where she denounces Somalia’s neighbors as ‘occupiers’ who have been ‘stealing’ Somalia’s land, she denounces another ethnic group as ‘so-called Somalis’.

That group of ‘so-called’ Somalis is fighting to be independent of the Somalis who have systematically murdered them. In this speech, Ilhan is aligning herself with genocidal terrorists who have affiliation with Al Qaeda.

Between 1987 and 1989, the regime of Somali dictator Siad Barre massacred an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq tribe, the largest clan group in the northwest part of Somalia. At the time, some Isaaqs were fighting for independence, and to eliminate the threat, Barre tried to exterminate all of them. Experts now say there are more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most of them in the Valley of Death.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of what is often called the “Hargeisa Holocaust,” when about 90 percent of the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of Isaaqs were killed. Yet there are no major plans to mark the horrors in Somaliland, or anywhere else for that matter. In the past, a few international organizations have recognized the bloodletting. A 2001 UN report investigating the attacks against the Isaaqs concluded that “the crime of genocide was conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somalia Government against the Isaaq people of northern Somalia.” But the events have been mostly forgotten; the boys playing soccer did not know the story behind the bones. —PulitzerCenter

How DARE Somaliland ask to be free of the country that has been systemically exterminating their entire ethnic group!